Letters to the Editor
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Thanks for the link, Kitt
I guess I'd better do a little more searching... and in the meantime, not repeat that story.
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@WT on education
I have always favored the melting pot model to the multicultural diversity model. Maybe that's because I am, with respect to the country, not the descendant of immigrants: My forebears were immigrants to the continent, but all were here by the American Revolution. Which is not to say there weren't surprises and prejudices -- I found out at the age of 50 that I'm half Pennsylvania German, because my great-grandparents changed their names during World War I.
But I tend to think I favor the melting pot because it yields a single country at the end, and not an enclaved collection of divergent interests. I also have a bad taste in my mouth about the exact phrase "multicultural diversity" because of its somewhat different use, or perhaps different standard, in Singapore.
Either way, the civil and human rights standards of the country are more, not less, important subjects of study than personal ethnic background. They are things that everyone should know if they live in this country, and their importance isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of rights and responsibilities. In fifth grade I was taught that habeas corpus was the right that was in the main body of the Constitution instead of the Bill of Rights because it was more important than anything else. Maybe that's only a fifth grader's take on it, but I think not.
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@ondelette
Has the melting-pot model actually yielded "a single country at the end, and not an enclaved collection of divergent interests?" It seems to me that, in fact, it did not. The evolution of our current demographical landscape is complex, but a significant factor that can be used to trace a coherent pattern is the category of race.
Our conception of race has, of course, changed with time; the notion that there was a "white" race and a "black" race is a relatively recent development, one that came about due to the necessity of co-opting the populations of European immigrants that came here in the 1800s and early 1900s, and who lived in fairly ethnically homogenous neighborhoods. This is a mid-20th-century notion; prior to that, in the North, the Irish, Poles, Russians, Italians, et. al. were not considered white. Whites were people whose ancestors had been here for awhile already, mainly WASPs. There are inevitably regional variations, since the in South, many people of Scots-Irish descent were "white;" of course, "whiteness" didn't really come to be defined well until after the Civil War.
When immigrants from Ireland, Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe arrived here, they were largely confined to ethnic enclaves. The Jews, Irish, Italians, et. al. competed for scare resources. They had their own criminal organizations. Blacks, OTOH, remained completely outside this sphere. Until the 1910s and 1920s, they were still mostly in the South, where they were (as we all know) repressed. The boll weevil epidemic began bringing them north.
The breakdown of the urban ethnic enclaves began during this period, as European immigrants and their immediate (up to 2nd, sometimes 3rd generation) descendants began to be encouraged to think of themselves as "white," so as to prevent any notion of solidarity with "the negro." It accelerated following World War II as Blacks gained increased economic opportunity as a result of the desegregation of the defense industry under FDR and the military under Truman. This gave rise to the practice of "block busting," wherein real estate companies would select areas that they would move Blacks into, the local press would start running stories about the impending Negro invasion, and most "white" people moved to the suburbs to get away from them (the origin of white flight). Naturally, since everyone was selling, prices were low; but the real estate companies would turn around and sell the property to the incoming Blacks, giving them loans at exploitative rates.
Much enclaving these days is done along class lines, moreso than racial lines, although institutional racism still plays a significant part in determining class position across racial boundaries. The well-to-do have never wanted the hoi polloi living nearby. They're simply too gauche. Thus the proliferation of gated communities and suburban sprawl.
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write your congressman!
Here's mine:
Congressman Buchanan,
I'm a registered Republican, and I voted against you in the last election. I did that, because I believed that you supported the policies of the current President of the United States. I'm writing to you today to ask you to work to restore the writ of Habeas Corpus. That this fundamental right was withdrawn redefines our government as an autocracy, not the Republic that I love. We are less secure without this defining right. Your efforts to redeem our party and protect our constitution by returning this right to the people will win you my vote and voice here in Bradenton.
Thank you,
Paul Stone
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When are the pigs flying?
While Bush & Cabal may indeed be the final death blow to a free USA, Clinton was not much better at holding off the international money men from rolling up the carpets in this once great country.
Dems and Reps are two sides of the same internationalist coin that has already decided the American experiment is over. They are now just threading their way through the most efficient way to get rid of the evidence.
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@IngSoc
Hmm. You have written a lot to think about. However, ethnic enclaving is the norm in immigrant communities like coastal cities in the absence of forces against it. The melting pot philosophy was not a construct to encourage people to band together against other races, at least not when it was taught in my school, it was a goal. The goal was that we would all live together, as one. Did it work? Hard to say, it had a big effect on me, and on the others in my community, and did mix up populations that otherwise might have stayed with "their own".
By contrast, I now live in a community where multiculturalism is de rigeur. I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but what is being taught is solidarity with ones own ethnic heritage up to and including at the expense of a unified whole. It is considered natural that America should consist of largely unmixing groups who know more about where their ancestors came from than about where they and their parents live.
What does it lead to? I recently worked in a workplace that was 73% Chinese with an average age of about 33. We had a recent round of layoffs, miraculously, although all layoff decisions had supposedly been made based on project requirements, everyone who was laid off was white, and most were over 40 (it had other attributes as well, like that only Chinese from (or with parents from) a particular country of origin somehow became managers).
At one point, quite prior to the lay off, I had complained about the ethnic makeup of the resumes I had received for an open hire. I was required to do that because the makeup did not correspond to the makeup of the local or national hiring pool. The recruiter gave me a long spiel about how it was really strange that everybody who went into the subfield in question was Chinese. When I remarked that at a previous company I had been told by an English recruiter that the same subfield was remarkably one that everybody who went into it was British, I got a long spiel about, you guessed it, multiculturalism.
The recruiter didn't think she was doing anything wrong, she thought that it was only natural (it turned out) that people "hire their own." She thought that that is how American society is supposed to work, and that it leads to rich cultural diversity as different groups become good at different things. She was born and raised here, and her multicultural education had essentially instilled a deep belief in segregation.
That being as it may, I still maintain my previous point, that there is no excuse for not teaching the fundamentals of American society and requiring them to be learned early in children's lives in this country. Least of all that it conflicts with multiculturalism.